Microsoft's PR Team Misfires As The Surface Pro Launches

The launch of the Microsoft Windows 8 Surface Pro has not gone to plan. While many people have been waiting to see what Microsoft's second tablet device would be like, mistakes in presentation and allowing others to dictate the story has damaged the launch of the Surface Pro.

The biggest fuss has been over the storage available to the users of the 64GB and 128GB Surface Pro. Once the space taken up by Windows 8 is subtracted from the value, along with the portion of the disk set aside for recovery, there's only 89.7 GB left on the 128 GB Surface Pro!

The fact that if you dump the recovery data onto a USB stick (which is good practice anyway) you get 97.5 GB of storage. A quick look at the MacBook Air 128GB, and you'll find the available user storage is 99.5 GB out of the box.

For as long as I can remember, storage advertised on a laptop-styled device has always included the space used by the operating system. Microsoft's PR should have reacted in a much stronger fashion when this story started to build online, either because they have war-gamed out this reaction and knew what to do, or because they were monitoring the chatter and spotted the potential negatives.

Maybe they were focused on building up a news cycle around the launch and the popularity of the hardware? Are they ready with a press release proclaiming a sell-out weekend for the Surface Pro. Certainly the first reports online were pointing towards a positive result along those lines.

Unfortunately many online reports on these sell-outs are pointing out that the sold-out locations received only a handful of units, and in the case of some chain stores just one or two Surface Pro units were supplied for the launch of the device.

If there's one thing that people are expecting from Microsoft, it's to see an underhand move. Reading the reports, that opinion is going to be solidified and making it that bit harder to sell a Microsoft branded product, especially one that is one hundred percent Microsoft on both the software and hardware side of things.

If you want to find a silver lining, people are talking about the Surface Pro online, building up the awareness.

That talk is nice, but it's not enough. It might move the needle a little bit for a few days but it won't help build momentum. What would really have an impact is a significant volume of tweets, Facebook messages, blog posts, Tumblr pictures, and more, from customers who have purchased the Surface Pro. Customers who'll spend time doing an unboxing video. Customers who could evangelise the Surface Pro and create a snowball effect in sales. And will one of the first customers be Blendtec so they can the answer 'will it Blend'?

I'm watching carefully to see if there's a groundswell of comments from the real world.